Bomb squad closes UCSC entrance to remove geocache box

Bumper-to-bumper traffic made up of cars and buses trying to get to campus were rerouted to the west entrance on Empire Grade.

Sean Levasseur, a student at UCSC, had gotten caught in the back-up. He had a midterm at 10 a.m. today but said he doubted he'd make it to the test on time. He said he hoped his professor would give him some "leeway."

"I hope that they don't count it against me," he said.

Campus spokesperson Jim Burns did not know what the object was but described it as "suspicious." Police officials would not say what the object appeared to be.

The Santa Cruz County Bomb Team arrived around 10:40 a.m. to investigate. The crew used a water canon to detonate the object.

It was then determined to be a box associated with a hide and seek, scavenger hunt-type game for GPS users, called Geocaching. In the game, players use a Global Positioning System receiver to hide and seek containers called geocaches. The caches are typically small waterproof containers that have a logbook and "treasure,"
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often toys or trinkets.

Just before 9 a.m., students, faculty and staff were told via text message, e-mail and voice mail to avoid the main entrance to campus.

Stanley Rabut, a student at UCSC, said he awoke to three text messages from the university around 10 a.m. alerting him to the situation.

"It's a lot of hoopla over nothing," Rabut said after hearing the disruption was caused by a game.